The head of Xbox claims that acquiring Bethesda will make the Redmond-based company much stronger in the RPG genre.

Phil Spencer was interviewed by Major Nelson, and here, he explained how excited he is about the new year: „When it came to the time when they [Zenimax, the owners of Bethesda] were looking at potentially becoming part of a bigger company, getting sold, I was glad that we were part of the conversation that they were willing to have and it means something to me that they would sign up to become part of Xbox. 2021 is when we’ll get final approval, I feel really good about that, everything is on track. We’ll start then really getting some of the planning that we can do with them, right now we’re very hands-off as they continue to do the work that they’re doing as we don’t own them yet.

The other thing I’ll just say is the commitment that the company, Microsoft, has given us when we rolled the idea into CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood when we went and said ‘We have this idea…’ Our business is doing well, we’re running a profitable, growing business. They have a lot of belief [in Xbox]. I mean, just the fact that we would go through an acquisition of this size. That Monday when we announced [it] I couldn’t sleep on Sunday night, I was nervous, I was anxious, I was excited, I had all the emotions. Then we kept it quiet, it was so cool to see the reactions from Xbox fans and probably more importantly to me, now the Bethesda teams, because those teams will be very, very critical to our progress going forward.

[These are] exciting, exciting news. I can’t wait to get it closed so we can start working like one company. I’m incredibly excited about Starfield and a lot of the other things, some announced and some unannounced, that they’re working on. I just think that they’ll be an incredible addition to our studios. When I think about our RPG capabilities with Obsidian, inXile, with that Playgrounds is doing, with what Bethesda can do, it’s a massive capability. And also for FPS capability, with id Software and 343 Industries… It just doubles the size of our first-party studios when Bethesda joins. I’m excited about 2021 and Bethesda is an incredibly important part of that,” Spencer said.

The next game from Bethesda Game Studios (Todd Howard), Starfield, might launch this year, but it might either outright skip the PlayStation 5, or Sony’s console might receive it later.

Source: WCCFTech